Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  As if to say, let’s first look at this scent while it’s cold, she started to bend over each of the delicate parts of the body Kienast had named, one by one.

  The flapping of the swinging doors could be heard again. Which meant that somebody had once again opened the fucking window in the hall.

  Even though Kienast himself closed it several times a day.

  If only he could catch the person doing it.

  This was probably the moment when Kienast noticed the human being in her, the person he had not known until then. Which surprised him. He should have known her very intimately; after all, he had slept with her a few years before. If memory did not deceive him, they had both reached great heights of satisfaction. The mutual pleasure had its endearing little characteristics, as it were, which made both of them see and experience the other, and they could not have forgotten each other any more than they forgot other partners, but let’s say there was nothing more to it.

  Occasionally one can very definitely feel something like this: unforgettable but nothing beyond that. And that’s enough for a pleasant memory. But not strong enough to make one go back. And the other one must feel the same way; after all, s/he’s not coming back either.

  It was as if back then he had only seen something mechanical about her, and now he saw something essential, and there didn’t seem to be a direct connection between the two. He could not have told himself exactly what the nature of the mechanical pleasure may have been or, in contrast, what the nature of pleasure might be with this essential being. Or what her essential self would promise. But he saw clearly that the two were not the same.

  Perhaps the essential in itself is beyond description, but seeing it enables one to describe the former experience as mechanical.

  There’s no point in waiting to fall in love; one can’t resist surrendering to one’s own great mechanical pleasure, which may be the very thing that blocks falling in love.

  Annick surprised him with her very fragile professional passion, though her manners were rather crude, like her voice and physique. In the brightly lit hall with its floor-to-ceiling tiles, she gave no sign of her passion. She may have swayed her head, pensively, raised her eyebrows a little, but even that she did cautiously. She must have captivated him with her professional objectivity, which in no way clashed with humility or devotion. As if he were saying to himself about the woman that he’d never seen anything so beautiful even though he could see she was not so beautiful. Just as one’s distance from and proximity to an object meet on the object, without which the object might perhaps not exist.

  Conclusion, asked Kienast, impatient to know her findings.

  We’d better wait a little more.

  Kienast suggested they leave the corpse, go to his office, have coffee in the canteen or go anywhere, but out of here.

  No, they’d better stay.

  Just because they are staying Annick doesn’t have to look at the corpse, and out of politeness, he held her eyes.

  Then he said that the scent had been properly applied, but it might also have been smeared on.

  They could not have said what they were looking at with each other, but they remained like that for a long time.

  Eventually they spoke of Annick’s exceptional vocation, which made it easier to remain in the mute and neutral realm and to keep the corpse from slipping back into their consciousness.

  They did not sit down.

  Two days later Kienast would not remember what they had talked about.

  But they did not grow tired.

  Then, just as Döhring had indicated, the barrier became visible, the small border station. Kienast stopped the car but did not turn off the engine, only lowered his high beams so as not to blind the border guard sauntering in their direction.

  Kienast asked Döhring if he had his papers with him.

  Döhring answered that he really hadn’t expected to cross the border.

  He laughed irritatingly—literally neighed.

  Well, then, tonight you’ll do that too, Kienast answered and showed his official badge.

  They were on their way within minutes, but that irritating laugh hovered in the air between them for some time. A short distance from the border, near Venlo, they found an open restaurant overlooking the dark river, the Maas. At the far end of the hall, around a long table festively decorated with clusters of candlesticks, sat an all-male group, loud and jovial. The candle flames seen between their faces showed the direction of the draft.

  Kienast and Döhring sat down at a table by the window where it was cooler, almost offputtingly so, but they stayed far away from the men at the big table.

  The choices tonight aren’t much, said the waiter.

  Tell us what you have.

  Cream of asparagus soup.

  They both laughed, which the waiter did not understand; he looked at them suspiciously.

  No, thank you, we won’t want that.

  Fish in aspic, and the waiter indicated the long table, what the friends there are eating.

  What d’you say.

  Made with river fish—bream, perch, tench, the waiter said, and he pointed toward the Maas.

  They ordered the fish in aspic, some wine to go with it, and then looked out at the river, of which they could see only as much as the restaurant’s large window faintly illuminated, as though a motionless slightly cambered metallic mass were lying out there.

  Annick returned to the corpse two more times. But even before that Kienast had asked her if it was possible to take samples.

  Theoretically, yes, but for that it has to warm up more. And I’d need some blotting paper.

  And if you can take a sample, can the sample be preserved.

  Theoretically.

  How.

  We put it into a phial, seal it, wax it, and analyze it.

  And would she give her expert opinion on it.

  Why would she not.

  An hour later they returned to the corpse for the third time. She was almost certain, and seemed to be excited about this, that it was a very expensive and rarely used scent, prepared by special request at the Paris perfumery of Eugène d’Estissac.

  What’s it called.

  L’Épice du Bonheur.

  Standing at the feet and head of the corpse, they burst out laughing.

  Perhaps they acknowledged that this might be the only spice of happiness.

  It contains a few unrecognizable ingredients, which is only natural, probably some animal gland or secretion, then leather, bark, pepper, and coriander, which give the scent its male character, cedar, probably some hesperidins—lemon or orange, I think both—and hay and even some tonka beans, which dissolve and lighten the masculine elements, and then patchouli and vanilla, which give it a feminine tone.

  But how can you know this so precisely.

  Coffee, he added.

  For me, this would be too many good things to choose from.

  You can’t always tell who the murderer is, either.

  Not always.

  But sometimes you can.

  In Full Swing

  In the spring storm, the city remained deserted at night; not a soul anywhere, but this did not dishearten either of them.

  They were preoccupied with themselves, with their own little past and their own little future.

  On Queen Vilma Road, Kristóf excitedly showed her the restaurant garden, which had been empty and closed for years, where a long time ago Hedda Hiller used to sing at the sunny afternoon teas. Their eyes searched through the bare, nervously swaying branches of the horse chestnut trees to find the terrace from which he had watched the heavenly chanteuse and fainted in his fright.

  It was as if he were giving away a guarded family secret.

  As Klára leaned forward the better to see the terrace, the smooth mink coat opened on her body.

  Not that way, look over here, it’s the third one from the left.

  Amid the busy pointing, their faces touched, perhaps accidentally, and there
was her scent, her shoulders and her breasts. The contact was so light and accidental, their bodies taut as bows, that they both burst into laughter and then laughed in each other’s face. In which act there was enough death-defying courage to make them recoil. Their future became heavy and their past threatening; they said nothing.

  Later, at a slow pace, they turned on to Aréna Road so Kristóf could show her the building facing City Park that his great-grandfather had built in defiance of the prevailing notions of his era. Klára was interested, curious about everything, or at least she gave the impression that she wanted to know everything about him and all at once. In the distance, somewhere around Heroes’ Square, they saw police assault cars again, parked with their searchlights aimed at each other above the darkly glittering pavement, but the two of them ignored the cars and searchlights since they were going in the opposite direction.

  The squalls were strong, yet occasionally there was a sweet, spring lightness in the air.

  The pigs set up a veritable light barrier on the streets, Kristóf said, but no one in those days would have said anything about it out loud or even thought it. Bright light from the assault cars came though the rear window of the car and turned their faces eerily pale. Even if one didn’t have a guilty conscience, this light made one feel that one’s unguarded thoughts might be exposed at any moment and one would be caught doing something unawares; one cannot deny all one’s unguarded thoughts. Kristóf preferred not to look at Klára. He wanted to show her the many abandoned locales of his life, and he also wanted to initiate the ignorant country girl into the stormy events of the city’s living history and into the stories of its compulsive destructions and compulsive reconstructions. To flaunt his knowledge, his familiarity with world affairs, which of course was mainly familiarity with styles and languages. He could only barely hold forth on matters concerning which Klára was presumably very curious. To share the city’s jealously guarded topographical secrets. He chose to head in this direction, lead her this way; this would be a less dangerous route. After all, this is where in glimmering darkness his mother had met the older communist woman for the first time, in the dark crowd thronging under the swaying lamps at a block party. At that time the streetcar line was still running here, and he told her what direction the number 11 streetcar came from and where it went to, how it rang its bell for the dancers to let it pass.

  And Klára cried out that she had never seen a block party and would really like to.

  How well he remembered that warm night, the noisy party on the street, the phenomenal auntie in her glittering dress who danced with his mother, how both women threw back their heads as they laughed and kept on laughing and how both women later disappeared, the auntie and his mother, leaving only the name of a city behind: Paris.

  The revelers wouldn’t let the streetcar pass until all the passengers got off and danced with them.

  It sounded improbable this evening, too sentimental, but it was from here, from the second floor of this blackened building with its peeling plaster, that they had taken away his father, where now, behind the curtains, a lamp was shining at the far end of the room.

  They stopped here for a while, in front of the building, in the middle of the deserted, glimmering roadway. If he could have had his way, he would have taken back every sentence, every word he had uttered about his mother and father. But the question remained in the air, hovering between them, the real question: why a new love if everything ends like this, if everything is so brittle and every story is destruction and devastation.

  Wonder if Kristóf has someone else.

  They remained gravely distrustful of each other. The thought that perhaps he was in love with someone else began to take root in Klára, as if her jealousy was greater than her desire.

  It’s not possible that such a handsome boy didn’t have anyone.

  That’s how it is, though.

  Then you must be hopelessly in love with someone, she cried in her teasing voice, a voice she deeply disliked. I can see it with my own eyes.

  With you.

  If Kristóf had had enough presence of mind, which he did not, that is what he would have answered and then drawn her close, taking his chances.

  Why didn’t I hug her.

  However, he was repelled by her teasing, by her tone—borrowed from the chatty dramas featured in boulevard theaters. If he had wanted to gain her for himself. He looked at her in the dark, and the shining surface of the woman’s large eyes did not reject him. But he did not reply, and he did not want to lie to her; like a little boy, he drew up his shoulders. He did not risk rejection, perhaps on behalf of their future. He did want to gain her for himself, of course he did. Yet he couldn’t think about this openly and unreservedly. And what an impossible notion it was anyway, to gain someone for oneself. And he dreaded the other person’s bodily presence, anticipating what that notion might mean in their lives. Their silent individual efforts to avert or evade their current feelings clashed head-on—and then met, as was vividly registered in their faces, animated by the lights filtering in from outside. This changed their lives. So rapidly that they couldn’t follow it, and the woman somehow had to yank the steering wheel back to its normal position.

  It would have been better not to raise, comprehend, or hear these delicate inner questions.

  And what’s this about him being a handsome boy.

  Where does all this disdain for him come from.

  It would have been hard to comply with conventional custom and start talking again in the dark as if nothing had happened between them. He moaned, or rather groaned, under the weight of the presentiment that one might possibly possess another person. The future tense kept marching ahead of them, and at every moment, they realized, belatedly, what they had just said or done. This frightened them, and so they tried to create the illusion that it wasn’t even worth talking about. They had to conquer themselves on their own. As if love’s fear of death had to avoid or overcome a much larger fear.

  He thought of Aréna Road as crossing the city like some magical border or no-man’s-land that he could not get across alone—if you try it you become anyone’s prey—but he also wanted to show, right away, that he was completely at home in the two different zones on either side of the border: in the thick of the city, up the rear staircase, or in the precisely apportioned quiet streets by the boringly vast desert of City Park, in the once ransacked and then reconstructed grandiose villas of deceased wholesale merchants or banished industrialists.

  But why so much disdain toward him on the woman’s part.

  No, his great-grandfather had not built pretentious or grandiose buildings, no, not in that style, no, he wanted to have nothing to do with that sort of architecture. He disdained ostentation; being in proportion, that was his hobbyhorse, always talking about what was and what was not in proportion, what had to be made proportionate to what, and that’s why he was shoved to the periphery of his profession even as a young man. He could say no but not yes. But he was the one who had the idea for those crazy yellow tiles at the Lukács Baths and later for the paving on Pozsonyi Road. He was so headstrong that in the end he preferred to serve others. All his life he was ashamed of not having become a great architect but only a very rich contractor, a nobody to whom money stuck because he worked to please other people’s tastes and quickly squandered everything he earned. He built his brick factory on the outskirts of the city, in Budakalász, and from there he shipped his crazy yellow bricks everywhere, even to Vienna. He had one other great patent, the coke basket, which is used to this day in big construction jobs when they want to dry something very quickly. At a high temperature, the sulfuric content of coke becomes gaseous and engages the hydrogen and oxygen of water, burning one and precipitating the other, thus extracting the water from mortar.

  How could it have remained the family’s property. Why does Klára ask such stupid questions. In 1944 there was no longer such a thing as Jewish property.

  Leave off with that already.


  Why does she think she can provoke him like that.

  Lucky for the old man that he did not live to see it.

  The last Jewish transports were taken away to their doom from his brick factory.

  Anyway, he ruined everything at the right time, when everything was still in its heyday.

  At last they could have a laugh at something: that the great-grandfather had managed to ruin things.

  There was no inheritance.

  As if they were saying that nothing could be more uplifting than penury, when one is free of the dread of ownership. And one has to have a certain talent for ruining things, a sense of rhythm.

  They too will become worthy of their own doom, they too will squander and ruin everything in good time.

  He has nobody and never has had anybody.

  And why does he lie so shamelessly.

  Maybe some stupid affairs.

  One right after the other, probably.

  But he didn’t dare tell her that he didn’t really desire anyone. Didn’t want to. Instead, so as not to bog down in this uncomfortable subject of love and also to keep himself from thinking about the giant, whom he loved, yes, loved, or his mustached assistant, he quickly told her about standing in line at Glázner’s, but the woman had no idea where Glázner’s was or who Glázner was, and he told her he had stayed there after the bombing, how could he have left. The bread was more important. In emergencies one’s conscience narrows down its area of activity. He told her about the unknown lady who in the dust cloud and general chaos around the Duna movie house had disappeared from his life forever, about her injured face, her eccentric hats and cashmere turbans, to show that he understood the secret signals of feminine fashion in the city of his birth and if he had had his way he’d be still searching for his mother, which had become his obsession. Even in his sleep, he knows where she lives. From the Gare de l’Est he’d have to get to Châtelet, there take another métro to Saint-Mandé-Tourelle. Then go past the School for the Blind on République and it’s the first little street on the left, 3 rue du Lac. Looking at it on the map, he figures that the windows, at least on one side of the house, should face the Bois de Vincennes.